In today's digital economy, business sustenance is dependent on how quickly enterprises adapt to disruptive business models. In course of a digital transformation journey, enterprises encounter technology challenges - heterogeneous technology product stacks, legacy systems, middle ware, different system of records and integration with partner ecosystem. To address these challenges, integration technology has evolved from traditional point to point integration to a hub and spoke model (ESB) to a light weight micro services, API's, containerization, cloud based integration (iPaaS), API Platform adoption (with API's & Micro services development & management capabilities) & API Monetization to enable revenue generation model.

While transformation to the end state architecture is a phased approach, enterprises cannot afford to wait for long as there is a critical need to modernize their core legacy systems, adopt to an agile lightweight architecture that enables them to introduce new services and products to the market in a rapid time frame and reduced total cost of ownership. Enterprises are looking for a quick solution to integrate across their extended ecosystem so that services can be made available out of the box and offered as a service. Aligning to this need, "Integration Services in a Box" offers wide set of connectors prebuilt and available for immediate use, quick time to market for new products and services, solution to address limited IT budgets for integration, SDK's to build custom connectors and services available on demand to access, build, deploy and manage anywhere.

"Integration Services in a Box" is a set of core integration services contextualized to each industry vertical and a primary set of core services can be made available as a minimal viable product (MVP). To meet the need of a digital savvy customer, the foundation block of "Integration Services in a Box" would comprise a matured API management platform, API analytics, microservices (API management platform to be leveraged for microservices development), an iPaaS (Cloud based Integration platform) , containers (use Dockers, Kubernetes) and BaaS (Backend as a Service) to integrate with different system of records. The "Integration Services in a Box" can be deployed in an on-premise or cloud (any of the clouds like AWS, Azure or Pivotal cloud Foundry (PCF)).

As we are seeing an increased adoption to cloud, self-service capabilities and BoTs, "Integration Services in a Box" would be the next gen integration technology and we will see this becoming a key technology enabler for a digital enterprise.

Raviprasad has been with the IT services industry for over 20 years with expertise in API Management (APIM) product consulting & platform implementation, IP's development, API & Microservices architecture development & implementation and Cloud integration strategy development & implementation. He has led large digital transformation engagements and has helped customers in adopting an API first architecture and move to an enterprise level APIM platform.

In his current role, Ravi heads the APIM & Dell Boomi groups under Enterprise Business Integration practice providing technology advisory, API strategy, CoE setup & product implementation services for fortune 100 customers across industry verticals. He can be reached at ravi.rprasad@wipro.com